SHELBY, N.C. — We showed you some of the text messages between a family at the center of the investigation into Asha Degree’s disappearance, but getting the family’s physical phones could push the case forward.
It’s been 25 years since Degree was reported missing. Channel 9′s Ken Lemon got search warrants this week with bombshell new information.
Investigators talked to a man who says he heard a daughter of one of the suspects in the case say, “I killed Asha Degree.” Investigators then got that daughter’s text messages from the cloud.
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Now, experts say that analyzing the daughter’s phone could tell investigators so much more.
“It’s the one device that people keep on them at all times,” said Skip Graham with Spy-Tec in Belmont. “Your phone is like your memory, it’s like having another brain and you carry it around with you, and you tell that phone a lot of secrets.”
Investigators believe secrets stored on cell phones can tell them what happened to Degree. They believe the 9-year-old was killed not long after she left her home.
Police believe Roy and Connie Dedmon of Shelby helped cover up the crime to protect a daughter who reportedly once said she killed Asha.
According to search warrants for her iCloud account, she texted her sister last September after investigators searched their parents’ property. She said, “The theory is I did it. Accident. Covered it up.”
Graham says they can see much more now that they have seized her actual phone.
“When you delete something on your phone, it’s not really gone. It’s still there until you run out of hard drive space,” Graham said.
Clark Walton, a former threat analyst with the CIA who has given key forensic data testimony in major trials, says a phone examination can also provide detailed GPS information and more.
“A minute-by-minute what was happening on that device,” Walton said.
They can even see how the phone was held each time, plus any information on apps hidden from the cloud. He said they can pull the information in less than a day, then the work begins.
“Looking through it, making sense of it, coordinating it with other pieces of evidence in your case can take some time,” Walton said.
Multiply that work by three. Investigators now have Roy Dedmon’s cell phone and the phones of two of his daughters, including the one at the center of their investigation. They’ll have access to those phones for about a week.
(VIDEO >> ‘I caused this’: Warrants reveal text messages after recent search in Asha Degree case)
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